Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of an article from FierceRetail, an e-newsletter and website covering the latest retail technology news and analysis.
Retailers are finding yet another critical use for beacons: parking.
Shoppers who park and receive messages on their smartphones from businesses nearby are 30 percent more likely to visit that location, according to HotSpot, a Canadian mobile parking payment solution and proximity marketing company.
HotSpot partnered with beacon provider Kontakti.io in parking lots to contact shoppers and then track behavior at nearby retail locations. The application lets shoppers monitor and pay for parking remotely, eliminating the uncertainty and risk of tickets and fines. And ultimately, the parking innovation allows consumers to shop more freely.
For their part, merchants, who pay a subscription fee for the service, have the option to cover parking fees to encourage shoppers to visit or stay longer.
Much of the discussion and promise of proximity technology has centered around the in-store or in-mall experience. But by addressing another pain point — parking — merchants can create a better shopping experience in different ways.
Source: Kontakt.io whitepaper
"HotSpot Parking is a pretty complicated business idea: serving a central coordinator between the needs of three different and powerful groups of people, they thrive because they exist to solve a complicated problem well, and because they don't have to worry about the software or hardware side of their proximity business thanks to Kontakt.io," noted a HotSpot whitepaper. "Balancing the needs of the city, the retailers and their customers, they launched initially with some simple goals, overcame some challenging hurdles, and have grown to be the largest application of their kind in Canada."
HotSpot now incorporates roughly 30 percent of the parking facilities in four Canadian cities with 500 beacons deployed. On average, users spend 61 minutes in the store, which is seven minutes, or 13 percent longer, than the average time spent in brick-and-mortar stores, according to ICSC/Shopping Centers Today.
HotSpot recently partnered with Passport Parking of North Carolina to expand in the U.S.